


phone tag

by maggierachael



Series: grade school games [1]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: (feat. some small brief mentions of violence so look out), F/M, a backstory to kitty corner i guess?, and my sweet child cory will be STRESSED, but just after whenever all the shit goes down with carrillo and the kids, cory is javi's childhood best friend and there is TENSION, don't let javi have a sat phone when he's drunk, he will make poor choices, i don't remember episode numbers, i will repeat it for the thousandth time: let javi R E S T, mid-season....two i think?, or are you calling me because you're having some kind drunk text ur ex moment, ridiculous fools, that good good are we friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:40:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22805008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: “So, what?” she asked, avoiding the statement. “You want me to come to Bogota so I can paint murals for you, and then what? I come back home and go another year and a half without seeing you? Or would you let me stay and I can shack up with Connie and work as a nurse til I can drag your ass home where it belongs?”“Forget I said it.”Sometimes Javi thinks he shouldn't be trusted with a sat phone.
Relationships: Javier Peña/Original Female Character(s)
Series: grade school games [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639453
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	1. september third. dallas. midnight.

**Author's Note:**

> "Love, drugs, sex, pain  
> Those are just grade school games, nothing major  
> Nothing ages  
> Nothing changes but the names and dates
> 
> Blush, pull, push, blame  
> Those are just grade school games, nothing major  
> Old behaviors  
> Trade some favors  
> Then give chase, take claim"
> 
> -Dessa, "Grade School Games"

Cory was nearly falling asleep on her couch when she heard the landline ring loudly in her ear. 

She’d had a long day. Labor Day weekend meant that she’d had to stuff three days of lesson plans into one, grappling with all shapes and sizes of little monsters without the help of her usual assistant. It was a week she dreaded every year, despite the long weekend that came as a reward, and it had wiped her out. She hadn’t even bothered changing out of her paint-stained boiler suit before she ate dinner, plopped down in front of the television with the goal of not moving anywhere until Monday morning. She hadn’t had a Friday off in ages, and she was going to treat herself, dammit. 

And she did so for several hours...until the phone rang. 

At least the receiver was next to the couch. 

“Brooke residence, how can I help you?” 

She cringed as she cradled the receiver between her ear and her shoulder, using her hands to turn the volume on the TV so she could hear. Despite the hours of reruns and cold pizza, she still wasn’t able to turn off her teacher voice after a long day of work. She prayed it was nobody important on the other end of the line. 

“Hey, Cory.” 

The tension that tightened in her shoulders whenever she answered the phone loosened at the sound of the greeting, crackly and distant as it came patched through all the way from South America. Javi. 

She hadn’t talked to him in ages. Their work schedules didn’t exactly line up as much as she’d like them to, so she’d gone without hearing from him for the better part of two and a half weeks, aside from a quick letter scribbled on a memo pad to let her know he was still alive - which, unfortunately, was more of a necessity in his field than they both would’ve liked. Long stretches of silence made her worry for her closest friend, so hearing her name in his voice was a bigger relief than she’d like to admit. 

“Hey. Long time, no phone call.” 

She discarded the TV remote in favor of actually holding the receiver, and shifted in her seat. Javi scoffed into the phone on his end. 

“I know,” he said. “Shitstorm got stirred up with the police and I’ve been spending the week playing janitor. Not exactly free to make social calls.” 

“Makes sense,” Cory replied. “I’m in Labor Day hell this week, so it’s not like you missed much. You know how that is.” 

“I do.”

He paused, and a comfortable silence floated between them. White and open, like a canvas waiting to be painted on. Javi was the only person Cory could sit in silence with and not feel weird. 

“Long day at work, huh?” 

“Mmm.” Javi sighed. “You have no idea.” 

His words didn’t sound as clear as usual. They were softer, darker than usual. Like the old grey UMass sweatshirt she kept in the back of her closet for rainy days. Worn, aging, the edges having frayed to comfortable softness years ago. Javi was never a loud guy, but this was muted even for him. Cory credited it to a bad phone connection - international phone calls were crap, especially when he wasn’t near the embassy - and also the fact that it was nearly two in the morning in Columbia. He sounded just the slightest bit resigned, and it made her heart ache just the slightest bit.

“‘M sorry,” she muttered, trying to match his tone. “Want to talk about it?”

She heard Javi grunt something that sounded suspiciously like a “no”. She didn’t blame him. 

“Mmm. Okay. Well...I can stick the receiver next to the TV if you want. I haven’t done much of anything except watch  _ Cheers _ for the better part of three hours.”

Another grunt. 

“Just wanted to talk to you.” 

Cory chuckled. He always said that. 

“Well, you’ve accomplished that much,” she replied. “Not that I can make great conversation or anything though. Most interesting thing that happened to me today was having a toddler chuck wet clay at me, in case you ever wondered if that shit could leave a mark.” 

She expected at least a “huh”, if not a laugh, but Javi remained unreadable on the other end of the line. She could practically feel him scowling through the receiver. 

“Big bruise?” 

She nodded, despite the fact that he certainly couldn’t see her. 

“Massive. Right on my chest. Looks like somebody gave me a huge hickey. I’m gonna have to dress like a nun til it goes away.” 

That got the hoped for laughter out of her friend, a soft, distorted noise ringing through the line, and it eased the ache in her heart to a degree. She worried about him. His job was all-consuming, and the closest thing he had to family in Columbia was his partner. She worried that these phone calls were all the time he had to take a breather. 

“Now I have proof that you’re not the only one whose job is an occupational hazard.” 

She twisted the spiral phone cord around her fingers, the stark white of the wire the brightest sight in her dim living room. Javi scoffed. 

“I think you’re skewing the scale a little bit, Brooke.” 

“You try getting your hair yanked on and sharp art supplies tossed at you on a regular basis. Art classes are war zones in and of themselves.”

She tried to inject a smile into her voice, but considering the fact that she’d been up since six and it was nearly midnight, it sounded much closer to deranged than joking. The exhaustion decorated her works like cake piping, and the way that Javi sounded, she imagined he didn’t feel much better. She hated to let him hear her like this, when he already had so much on his plate to think about, but he’d called, and she’d never missed a call. Not once. 

“I miss you.” 

J avi’s voice was suddenly much louder in her ear, much more present than before. Gone were the worn edges, like he’d been half-asleep and was now suddenly awake. Cory shifted the receiver against her ear, sitting up in her burrow of blankets; this was new. 

“Miss you too, dork.” 

Her reply was quiet, subdued. The warmth in her voice was genuine this time. 

“You ever gonna let me visit? You know I grew up on a farm, I know my way around a gun if I need i--” 

“No.” 

It was one word, but Cory could recognize the DEA equivalent of a stern teacher voice when she heard it. Javier was not having that conversation right now. 

“I want to,” he continued, and Cory believed him. “You know I do. Hell, if I could be sure you wouldn’t get hurt, I’d have you on a plane tomorrow morning.” 

She smiled. 

“That’d be a little bit hard to explain to my boss.” 

“Fuck ‘em.” The color in Javi’s voice had changed, the dullness giving way to just a little bit of hope around the edges. “Could get you a job here. Teaching school kids art. Or painting. You always said you wanted to paint. We could get you in here. The fuckin’ bullpen could use some color for once.” 

“And what would you want me to paint in the bullpen?” Cory asked. “I’m not sure the embassy workers would be big fans of bad Bob Ross ripoffs.” 

“They wouldn’t know good art if it pistol-whipped them in the ass.”

Cory snorted. Javi certainly had a way with words. 

“Neither would you, blockhead.” 

There was some truth to that statement. Cory still wasn’t exactly sure how their friendship had lasted this long - she was a hippy bohemian type who’d gone to art school and spent her free time knee-deep in oil paint, and he was a left-brained federal cop whose highest exposure to art was the excessive amount of David Bowie she’d tortured him with in high school. 

“I know yours is.” 

Her house was a chilly icebox (a result of running the air conditioner all day to keep out the Texas heat), but Cory flushed a little bit anyway. Her recent art had been almost exclusively constrained to finger-painting with seven year olds and teaching fifth graders how to crosshatch a drawing. She’d said years ago that she’d quit her teaching job to pursue art full-time, but the closest she’d gotten since Javi had left for Columbia was a few half-finished canvases abandoned in her studio for lack of time. Her art was hardly that good. 

“So, what?” she asked, avoiding the statement. “You want me to come to Bogota so I can paint murals for you, and then what? I come back home and go another year and a half without seeing you? Or would you let me stay and I can shack up with Connie and work as a nurse til I can drag your ass home where it belongs?”

She regretted her tone as soon as the words came out of her mouth. It probably would have been less embarrassing to respond to the compliment, but her exhaustion had gotten the better of her, and a long silence followed her words. She feared the connection had burnt out in the long moments before he responded. 

“Forget I said it.” 

His words came out sharp and sudden, loud in Cory’s ear and different from the way he’d spoken to her up til now. He sounded...upset. 

“I know I keep saying I’ll be home soon,” he said, “And then I don’t call for weeks and Connie gets on my ass about it and the best I can do is a fuckin’ telegram from the embassy when some new shit crops up and they send into the middle of god knows nowhere, and--”

“I’m not your girlfriend, Javi,” Cory responded, cutting off the sudden monologue that she felt guilty for producing. “I know your job is busy, you don’t need to worry about--” 

“No, I do. We’ve been down here what, two and a half years now? And I’ve talked to you more than I talk to my own fuckin’ family, Cory. So I feel a little guilty not being able to at least see you. You and that stupid Jeep with the terrible fuckin’ suspension that you refuse to get rid of. That’s what I miss when I’m out in the middle of the goddamn jungle.” 

The words spilled out like a debutante mother who’d dropped a punch bowl at a party. They spilled out quickly and without a filter, washing over Cory in waves, who sat staring blankly at the wall as they just kept coming. Normally,  _ she  _ was the chatterbox. 

“And I know I can’t just turn in the towel on this shit. We’re too close for that. But sometimes, you wake up and think, ‘What the fuck am I doing here? My life is hanging out on a fuckin’ laundry line and if I bite it, nobody I care about is going to know for weeks. I could go home right now, turn in the badge, climb in my best girl’s shitty Jeep and forget this whole goddamn thing ever existed.’ Sometimes that sounds a little better than glory to me.” 

The monologue finally ground itself to a halt, Javi’s words looser than Cory had heard them since he’d gotten plastered at her grad school graduation ten years ago. They’d stunned her into a bit of a silence -- Javi was the most dedicated person she knew when it came to his job. He  _ never  _ talked about his work like that, not even when he was so frustrated his voice sounded black. He was committed, DEA over everything else, and she respected that. 

It took his heavier than usual breathing through the receiver to make her realize that maybe tonight wasn’t all that different from her graduation. 

“Javi, where are you?” She tried to measure her words, use them as a broom for the shattered pieces of the punch bowl. “It’s got to be late there, and you sound a little--”

“Home,” he responded quickly. “I’m home.” 

The words were staggered, sounding like an attempt to placate himself as much as Cory. She sighed as he continued. 

“Just...a bit--”

“Drunk?”

“Maybe.” 

He didn’t lie to her, merciful Jesus be praised. At least not outright. She could live with that. 

“Then you should be in bed.” She suppressed a sigh, hugging her blanket more tightly around her. “I don’t want to have to take responsibility for some hotshot DEA agent falling asleep on the job because he was up talking to me.” 

“You should be asleep too,” he responded. Now that she paid attention, ory could hear the alcohol-infused tones creeping into his voice. She certainly knew them well enough. 

“Kids have off tomorrow. I get to stay up past my bedtime.” 

The words hung in the air between them, falsely cheerful, and they felt like smog choking up the connection between Dallas and Bogota. She sighed. 

“This’ll be over soon,” she murmured. “You’ll catch those bastards, and you’ll be massive heroes, and you’ll get to come home to me and my terrible, terrible car picking you up from the airport and we’ll get awful tapas from that place downtown like we used to. It’ll be over in no time.”

“But what if it isn’t?” 

Javi’s voice sounded strained now, another twist in the strange path they were both going down without knowing how to stop. It made a vice close around Cory’s heart. 

“What if it’s not over soon? What if this drags out into next year, or the year after, or the year after? We can’t predict any of this. This job could go on for years, Corinne. What then? I get stuck here until you get married and I come home to you and a house full of kids?” 

His voice pitched up sharply, and Cory felt like she’d been punched in the chest. 

“I didn’t mean to…”

She paused, the rest of her response lost to thinking about what he’d said. She felt like the other shoe was hanging high above her head, and she was waiting for it to drop. To crush her. 

Javi didn’t say a word. 

“I’m sure we both just need some sleep,” she finished meekly. “I didn’t mean to get into it like that. I’m—”

“Forget about it.” 

Javi suddenly sounded a lot more level-headed than he had just a second ago. Then, he’d sounded frantic, his voice pitched up in the way that told her she wasn’t getting the entire story, and now he sounded like he did every other time he’d called her - normal, by-the-books Javier Peña who didn’t dabble in any bullshit. The concern in Cory’s heart only sky-rocketed. 

“Forget I said anything.” He paused, and Cory could hear him take a deep breath. “I’ll call you tomorrow, Cory. Goodnight.” 

And the line went dead. 

Cory was never more sure that she wouldn’t forget something in her life. 

_______

**12 HOURS LATER**

Javier’s brain threatened to leak out of his ears as he sat at his desk in at the embassy. 

His pulse pounded in his ears like a tiny marching army, and the words on the very important paperwork in front of him were being absorbed about as well as water being sopped up by a rock. The lights were too bright. The bullpen was too loud. The whir of the air conditioner was too intense. 

In other words, his hangover was fucking terrible. 

Not that he hadn’t worked with one before. He’d done it before, and he’d do it again if he had to, if only to survive the never-ending nerve grating that this job  consisted of sometimes. No, he’d come to the embassy hungover plenty of times. 

It was just the regret that stung a little more this time. 

He shouldn’t have called Cory. Not after such a shit day, when he was very nearly swimming in terrible Columbian beer from the bodega near his apartment. He was supposed to be playing his cards close to his chest, and here he was, calling the one person he knew he couldn’t resist spilling his guts to. He’d drunkenly called just to hear the sound of her voice, the only thing he had that proved not everything in his life was tied to this hellscape of a job. His guard went down as soon as she’d picked up, and now he’d gone and said something he was afraid he could never take back. 

Somebody should take his sat phone away from him. 

“Agent Peña, there’s someone here for you.” 

Javier glanced up from the convoluted legal terms that were still swimming a synchronized routine in front of his face. An embassy worker stood in front of him, hands clasped together so tightly he might break his own fingers. Young, well-groomed, clearly local. He looked nervous. 

“Tell them I’m busy.” 

He scowled. He didn’t have the energy to put up with some negging reporter or government official when his brain was running on empty. He’d call them back. 

“ _ Es una gringa,  _ sir.” The boy looked like he didn’t want to make trouble, but had to in order to keep his job. “Tiny blonde lady. Wearing street clothes. Says she needs to see you immediately.” 

Javier’s stomach dropped out from under him. 

“Did you get her name, kid?” He prayed his suspicion wasn’t right, and that this was some white woman with a bullshit tip who’d gotten his name from the papers. “I need a name.” 

“She said it was Cory, sir. That was all that I got.” The kid swallowed hard. “Strange name for a girl.” 

Javier could feel all the blood drain from his face as he set his papers down amongst all the rest. Now, despite the incessant air conditioning, his office suddenly felt like a sauna. 

He was  _ fucked.  _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For context: this is the same set of characters as in "kitty corner", just much earlier in their relationship! I tend to write things hella out of order, but I thought this was too good to wait on posting. Cory is an invented character, Javi's best friend since middle school (more on that later). She's got a bit of a rebellious streak in her, but I hope y'all like her, because there's more where this came from ;)


	2. september fourth. bogotá. noon.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Friends don't let friends suffer in silence.

“You shouldn’t be here.” 

Javier’s voice felt entirely too loud in the large marble lobby of the US embassy. It was loud enough that it rung out in the room, and he felt like it just kept bouncing, pinging off every smooth wall until it bounced out into the street and sailed away like a rogue toy ball, only to land God knows where. It was a voice he really, truly preferred not to use, but the sight of Cory Brooke standing in the middle of the American embassy, overalls rumpled and haphazardly stuffed suitcase at her feet, didn’t give him many options otherwise. 

The sound of her name out of the embassy assistant’s mouth had practically sent him dashing out his office door like a madman - if he checked, he’d probably notice a Roadrunner-like trail singeing the carpets of the embassy office from how fast he’d moved to haul her out of the spotlight. He knew what kind of hell she could cause if she didn’t get what she wanted, and he’d moved quickly enough that people would be giving him funny looks for weeks. 

Which he’d live with, considering that he’d made it three feet into the lobby before Cory had started spewing a monologue about how worried she was and how he couldn’t just leave her hanging over the phone when his job was literally threatening his life. It bounced off the walls as much as his own voice did, and the sound of her Southern-twanged voice without the filter of a shitty sat phone receiver, for the first time in nearly two years, sent his heart directly into his throat. 

“This is so fucking dangerous, Cory,” he said hastily. He felt like he couldn’t get the words out around the lump quickly forming in his throat. “What were you even thinking?” 

He’d dragged her quickly and without ceremony to a quiet corner of the lobby, out of the way enough that prying eyes wouldn’t suspect he was having a lover’s quarrel or some other kind of ridiculous bullshit. He didn’t need some punk kid making assumptions that could get back to the ambassador when he was already having a coronary. Not that Cory cared all that much. 

“Yes, thank you Dad, I didn’t know that it’s extremely dangerous for a white woman to be traveling to South America by herself with no notice,” she replied with a huff. “What a great fucking piece of information.”

She was standing with her hip cocked, her hands worrying the strap of her purse instead of sitting on her hips in the defiant gesture Javier had expected. Her hair was even more askew than usual, and she looked like she hadn’t bothered to do much beyond throwing clothes on before getting on a plane to see him. She still sounded like she wanted to kill him, though. 

“But that’s what you get for calling your best friend in the middle of the night and scaring the shit out of her.” 

Javier scoffed. 

“I’m not sure that exactly warrants booking a flight to a highly dangerous country on impulse,” he said. “How much did that cost you, anyway?” 

“I dipped into my savings a little bit.” Cory shrugged. “Are you sure you’re alright? Because you certainly didn’t sound like it last night.”

Every time he tried to get his heart rate under control, she punched him in the gut all over again. 

“Fuck, Cory. Not here.” 

“Do not “not here” me, Javier Peña. I did not get my ass on a plane at seven o’clock this morning and fly twenty-five hundred miles to Columbia for you to keep acting like this. Don’t you dare.” 

Javi sighed. Cory had done a lot of things one could categorize as reckless over the years, but this one really took the cake. He didn’t even know she had a passport, let alone one recent enough to fly to Columbia. What he did know was that she barely had any savings, and she’d gone and blown it all on him - she’d worked for years to get to a comfortable place, and then he goes and drunkenly pours his heart out to her and she’s back to square one. She’d burnt through years of hard work just because she was worried about him. She’d put everything on the line over one stupid phone call. 

“And I didn’t exactly expect my best friend to scare the shit out of me today,” he muttered, “So let’s call it a draw and say I’m a little flustered right now. Deal?”

He fixed Cory with a look, more to catch his own shallow breath than anything. Being stern with her was odd - he didn’t remember a time in recent memory when it was really necessary. But she’d gone and flown all the way down to Bogota, one of the most dangerous places Javier could possibly fathom at the moment, all by herself. She’d landed at the airport and somehow, still by herself, trekked all the way to the embassy without knowing a single word of Spanish, a thought that made him sick to his stomach over what could have happened to her. All that considered, stern seemed like a fairly appropriate response. 

Cory rolled her eyes, fixing a look right back at him. He ignored it and held out a hand for her duffel bag, currently sitting on the floor and making itself the only thing keeping him from bundling her up and taking her away from a place she never should have seen. He needed to take her someplace where he could think, where the threat of some higher up finding out he was shirking his work to deal with her sudden appearance would be mitigated. Any longer standing in this lobby and he might actually have a heart attack. 

“Deal.” 

Cory slid the bag towards him with one Doc Marten-covered foot, and watched him closely as he picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. 

“But you’re going to be honest with me at some point.” 

It was Javi’s turn to roll his eyes as he adjusted the bag on his shoulder, his attention now turned to getting his best friend out of the embassy as quickly as possible. He supposed he couldn’t avoid what he’d said on that phone call forever, but he could at least wait for the guillotine to drop until they weren’t at his place of employment. 

Mercifully, Cory seemed to take his cue in earnest and move, drifting more than walking towards the large double doors that would lead them out into the street. He placed a hand at the small of her back until they were out the door, a promise to her that he’d answer all of her questions without having to incriminate either of them to a bunch of stuffy government officials. 

“At least let me feed you first.” 

______

After twenty-some years of friendship, Javier knew there were few things that could shut Cory up when she was restless. He’d lived around her long enough to know that. 

What he didn’t know, however, was that apparently, street vendor  _ arepas _ were on that list. 

He thanked every god his brain could think of for that fact as they sat under a canopy of trees in the park closest to the embassy. He still had no idea how his friend had made it to the embassy without speaking a lick of Spanish - aside from all the swear words he’d taught her in grad school - and his heart rate was just starting to come down thirty minutes later, after he’d picked at the food she insisted he get for himself while watching as she devoured hers. 

The sight of Cory Brooke, sans makeup and wearing paint-stained overalls in the middle of Bogota - a place he’d forbidden her from ever visiting - was a sight he was still getting used to. He hadn’t seen her in person in nearly two  _ years _ , the longest they’d ever gone without seeing each other since they’d met. Her hair was longer now; she’d chopped off half a foot of dead ends just before he’d left, and now it was back to brushing her shoulders. She was thinner too. Her overalls practically hung off her now, and he could see her cheekbones in more detail than he would’ve liked. He was sure that he looked different too, but something in the back of his mind knew that he didn’t like not being around to see those kinds of changes in his friend. 

" I am actually happy to see you, y’know.” 

He nudged Cory’s bag with his foot as he sat, toying with the straps as it sat on the ground in a bid to avoid eye contact. He heard her perk up at his words more than he saw it, and watched her busted Docs trace patterns in the sidewalk as she listened. 

“Would’ve preferred if you’d called, though.” 

Cory scoffed, the aluminum of her  _ arepa  _ wrapper crinkling over the sound as she balled it up. Her Docs caught a loose piece of the sidewalk, leaving a scuff mark. 

“If I’d called before I left,” she replied, “I would’ve found myself on some international government list saying I was banned from entering Columbia as soon as I landed.” 

She chucked her balled up wrapper at him. It bounced off his arm and landed in his lap. 

“And those  _ arepas _ are too damn good for me to be banned from the only place I can get them.”

Javier could tell she was smiling without even having to look up at her. If anyone else had pulled that kind of bullshit on him, he would’ve rolled his eyes in their face and walked off, lost to the midday crowds on a Friday in Columbia’s capital. 

With Cory, he just silently considered the ball of aluminum in his lap before chucking it back at her. 

“I don’t think I have quite that much sway with the ambassador,” he said quietly. “Probably could’ve gotten you on a no-fly list though.” 

“That’s exactly my point.” 

Cory scooted closer to him on the park bench, her entire body frowning as he finally looked up at her. He’d intended to make a joke, but she’d changed tact. That worried him. 

“My best friend, the man who dedicated  _ years  _ of his life to land a position with the DEA, calls me in the middle of the night, drunk off his ass, talking about wanting to give all of those years of hard work up. Talking about being terrified that he’s going to come back to the girl he’s known longer than some of his own family caring about somebody else more than him. That happens, and my heart rate goes through the roof, and you expect me to  _ not  _ make a rash decision to make sure I’m not going to lose the only person I care about? You expect me to just sit around until you’ve sobered up enough to feed me some bullshit to placate my brain until I get to see you again, even if that’s another year or two away? Even if there’s a risk I could  _ never  _ see you again? I’m starting to think you don’t know me very well, Javier Peña.” 

She didn’t sound stern. She didn’t sound angry. Just…

Well, Javier couldn’t exactly place the note in her voice, but it was certainly more melancholy than he would’ve liked to hear. 

“So, since I sat in a shitty metal tube for so long that my ass is still asleep and basically nearly got myself fired to come check on you, I would really appreciate it if you’d be honest with me and tell me what’s going on.” 

A skinny left hand that still wore the claddagh ring she got in high school laid itself over Javi’s right one, and his heart jumped in his ribcage. The fact that she’d dropped everything and flown this far just to check on him was absurd. The kind of absurd that only a woman like Cory Brooke could pull off. Cory Brooke, the woman who had driven across the entire state of Texas in a day to visit him at academy training. The woman who’d sacrificed paychecks to help him make his service dues, and who’d planned a last minute drive from Dallas to New Orleans to celebrate his successful graduation. She was completely and utterly insane, and for that, he supposed he owed her the truth. 

But the truth was more gruesome than she’d think, and he feared her reaction to reality more than if he lied. 

Women like Cory Brooke didn’t deserve to be burdened with the truth. 

“I’m just...tired.”

He glanced down and squeezed her hand, feeling like an elephant was stepping on his chest with every word he said to avoid admitting what he’d seen before he called her. Her presence had the nasty habit of unfurling him like a venus fly trap, and it took everything in him not to do it this time, to avoid trapping her in the horror of his life when he inevitably closed off again. 

“This job is just endless days of two steps forward, one step back, Cee. More than that, actually.” He sighed. “You fight ‘til your knuckles bleed and they knock you out while you’re bandaging them up. You think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then you realize you haven’t even made it  _ to  _ the tunnel yet. You don’t sleep, and you don’t eat, and you end up in the middle of the fuckin’ jungle chasing a ghost you can’t even see. And I’m tired of it. Tired of the corrupt cops, and the red tape, and the thankless fuckin’ hours behind a desk filling out paperwork that doesn’t mean shit.” 

_ Tired of watching innocent kids getting shot for somebody’s sick idea of revenge. _

The words left a nasty taste in his mouth as they came out, the detritus of years of bleeding for a job that didn’t care an ounce about him poisoning his insides like out-of-date cyanide. (Nobody used that anymore. They just shot you in the back of the head and called it a day.) He felt slimy saying them to Cory, whose eyes he couldn’t meet for fear of breaking if he did. This wasn’t the world she was supposed to know about. This was everything he’d tried so hard to keep from her, even if she didn’t know the whole truth. Everything he was paranoid she’d hate him for if she ever realized how deep the cut actually ran. He felt like he should stop, but he couldn’t, her hand in his like some kind of backwards release valve. 

“I called because you’re the first person I always do,” he muttered. “That’s all. I call you because it’s a habit. You make me feel…”

_ Better? Like I’m not crumbling to pieces? Whole again?  _

“...less exhausted, I guess. I’m sorry that I scared you.” 

The stinging feeling of lying to his best friend made the rotten taste in Javi’s mouth all that much stronger, and he hesitated to look up at her now that he’d finished. He hadn’t told her everything, but nevertheless, what would she think of him? Would she think less of him for wanting to give up, for being anything less than the tough kid who’d given guys black eyes for her in high school? Or would she be horrified at the implications of what he had to do in order to see this job through? Any number of horrid possibilities ran through his head in the seconds before he lifted his gaze to meet hers. 

What he was met with was something much more familiar than anything running through his head. 

He was greeted with the same face he’d known since he was twelve, carrying the same expression he’d seen when his first girlfriend had dumped him in ninth grade, and when he’d sat on her couch in college, after nearly totaling the car his father had promised to let him drive. Cory Brooke had more sympathy in the palm of her hand than the entire godforsaken country she’d recklessly flown herself into, and it was all there, as clear as day on her face. 

“Then why don’t we see if we can’t get you a proper night’s sleep?” 

It wasn’t a smile that crossed her face as she responded, but something very close to it. Something that Javier hadn’t realized he’d been missing in the years since he’d left her behind in Texas. Something he hadn’t realized he’d missed, and which remained as she used their joined hands to drag him to stand and hugged him, in front of the entire park, the corrupt Columbian cops milling in the streets, and God himself. 

It was a long hug, one she’d clearly been aiming to give him since he’d seen her. Her bony arms crushed around his midsection, squeezing all the air out of him in a bid to replace all of it with some kind of love he didn’t think he deserved. She stood there for what felt like a whole minute, just like that, and it took him a few seconds to process it enough to hug her back. 

“You’re forgiven,” she muttered into the portion of his shirt where she’d buried her face. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” 

Javi sighed. 

If only she knew.

________

“Take the bed,” Javi had said. “I’m not letting my best girl sleep on the couch after she flew two thousand miles to check on me.” 

Cory begged to differ. 

Javi’s apartment was small, tucked into a tiny, nondescript corner of town that she figured was reserved solely for these kinds of government hideouts. She hadn’t exactly expected luxury, but it felt more like home than she’d expected. Quaint, and almost military in its cleanliness, though she’d never seen that out of him before. (Perhaps because he was rarely here?) The bedroom practically bled into the living room, and the nearly non-existent kitchen beyond that, but it was enough that she was finally able to relax once she’d dumped her things by the door. 

He’d walked her all over town once she’d finally stopped hugging him, suspiciously all too happy to play tour guide once he’d phoned the ambassador to say he had an emergency he had to take care of. (“I don’t appreciate being called an emergency, Peña, but I’ll let this one slide.”) She supposed he felt that she was safer with him around, instead of simply sending her back to his place and telling her to wait, so she’d accepted it, smiling as much as she could while he kept them close to the populated centers of town. It almost felt like normal, goofing off with him for a few hours, and now she was thoroughly ready to soak up as much of her best friend as she could before he forced her away for God knows how long again. 

“I am not letting you fuck your back up on this couch, Javier. You’ll barely fit!”

They were sitting side by side on the couch in question, shoveling takeaway empanadas into their mouths as they watched some Colombian soccer game that Cory couldn’t follow. She felt bone tired, all those hours of not sleeping and then rushing to the airport at six in the morning finally catching up to her. Her head was leaning on Javi’s shoulder, and the weight of him there was familiar. She hated how much she’d missed such a simple gesture.

“I’ll fit just fine.” Javi sighed, and Cory’s head moved with him as he did. “Not like the bed is much better.” 

Cory frowned. The Spanish she couldn’t understand from the announcers on the TV wasn’t helping her focus on her argument. 

“It’s your apartment,” she said flatly. Javi shrugged. 

“And that means I can sleep where I please. Which, in this case, is the couch.”

Her friend moved slowly and with purpose to shut the television off, gathering their now-empty food containers carefully enough that he didn’t disturb the way she was laying. He smiled at her gently, and she could see the dark circles under his eyes when he bent over to grab her tray. 

“Take the bed,” he repeated. “It’ll give you a good night’s sleep. You need it.” 

Cory lasted all of two hours in that bed. 

It was the middle of the night when she finally snuck out, too tired of sweating and overthinking and accomplishing nothing but staring at the ceiling to get anywhere close to sleep. Javi’s bedroom was nice, and the bed was certainly much comfier than the couch, but the fifteen feet that separated it from the living room was making her squirm. She had a feeling that it wasn’t just the desire to keep her rested that had forced Javi into the other room, and it may as well have been miles away for the way that it made her feel. She’d spent two long years being half a world away from her best friend, and to have those last handful of feet separating them was like slowly draining away her soul. 

The couch, as she’d predicted, was about as comfortable as a rock when she clambered onto it next to Javi. It was a tight fit, her stomach pressed flush against his back, but she didn’t care. They’d slept in the same bed before (hello, unsanctioned art school sleepovers), and she had no qualms about doing it again. She’d gone two years without being around him. She wasn’t wasting another damn second of time. 

“You should be in bed.” 

Javi’s voice was groggy in the darkness, her shuffling having stirred him enough to wake. She couldn’t see his face, but she swore to herself as his body stiffened against her. That had been the exact opposite of her goal. 

“I am,” she muttered softly. “Go back to sleep.” 

He did the exact opposite. 

“I meant in the actual bed.” He was more awake now, but no less grumbly. “Go back to bed, Cee.” 

“Only if you come with me.” 

It was a bold statement, particularly for three in the morning, but Cory didn’t care. She’d known Javi for most of her life. Bold was just another word in their long, varied vocabulary. 

“I haven’t seen you in two fucking years, Javi. I’m not wasting any more time.” 

She rested her forehead between his shoulder blades, something she’d done a million times before and yet somehow felt like something completely new this time. She felt her best friend tense like a scared rabbit, curling almost away from her, and she sighed. She didn’t know what was going on with him, and would probably never find out the whole truth, but she knew she couldn’t just let him live in it. Whatever he’d felt, whatever had run through his mind when he’d called her last night, that’s what she was there to prevent. And she wasn’t about to just leave him alone to his nightmares on the couch. 

“Just rest,” she whispered, her lips brushing the fabric of his t-shirt as she did. “You need it.” 

She let an arm wrap slowly around Javi’s waist to hold his hand, and she couldn’t bring herself to fall asleep until she felt him relax. 

When she awoke to his arm slung around her waist and his face buried in her hair, she didn’t bother waking him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "My god you two, just admit your feelings already, Jesus," she says as she plays God with a character she created and a universe where the variables are Very Sketchy. I have no shame left. This was pure indulgent bullshit and I hope y'all enjoy it. 
> 
> Let Javier Peña rest 2k20.

**Author's Note:**

> For context: this is the same set of characters as in "kitty corner", just much earlier in their relationship! I tend to write things hella out of order, but I thought this was too good to wait on posting. Cory is an invented character, Javi's best friend since middle school (more on that later). She's got a bit of a rebellious streak in her, but I hope y'all like her, because there's more where this came from ;)


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